The 2017 land price data released by the government continues to highlight the gap between big metropolitan areas around Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka and other regions of the country — and the polarization within the regional areas between major cities like Sapporo, Sendai, Hiroshima and Fukuoka, where the prices of both residential and commercial land plots are rising even faster than in the three metropolitan areas, and elsewhere.
The land prices, which reflect the concentration of people and business, and mirror the state of the local economy, testify to the slow progress in the government's efforts to reverse the population exodus from rural to urban areas and achieve a more balanced growth of the economy across the country. The Abe administration needs to get more serious about putting its regional revitalization agenda into practice.
According to the Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Ministry, the national average of residential land prices as of Jan. 1 stopped falling for the first time in nine years — since before the 2008 Lehman Brothers shock — while commercial land prices gained 1.4 percent from a year ago for the second annual growth in a row.